The value of prayer—

Prayer has been invented
for those people who
really never have thoughts of their own
and who do not know any elevation of the soul
or at least do not notice it when it occurs…

To keep them at least
from disturbing others,
the wisdom of all founders of religions,
small as well as great, has prescribed
to them the formulas of prayers
–as mechanical work for the lips…

Let them, like the Tibetans,
keep chewing the cud of their “om mane padme hum”
innumerable times…
Let them use prayer mills and rosaries:
the main thing is that
this work fixes them for a time
and makes them tolerable to look at.

What religion wants from the masses
is no more than that they should keep still
with their eyes, hands, legs, and other organs;
that way they become more beautiful for a while
and look more like human beings.

–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 128 by Friedrich Nietzsche

I must confess that I spent a good deal of my earlier life praying.  Is prayer an activity of mind, of intention that professional religionists conceived in a calculated fashion to support their business?  The injunction to pray keeps the average parishioner occupied, since they’d unlikely come up with anything on their own to occupy their minds…

The sardonic wit of Nietzsche is hard to miss in these lines of reflection on the prayer habits of the church-attending-faithful.  I understand his point of view because I have “been there and done that.”

I also think his angle of view is ungenerous.  To pray when in dire circumstances is a pure, uncalculated appeal for luck to break in one’s favor.  Prayer, in a pre-religious mode is entirely natural, and universal.

In the context of a religious tradition, prayer as a recurring habit, could be understood as similar to repeating the multiplication tables.  Repetition is the time tested method.   If intimate understanding of the relationship between numbers is important…  This is what you can do.

Agreed that human beings are dignified to the extent that we are quiescent, in a posture of rest, “more beautiful for a while” momentarily unconflicted, centered as a homo sapiens.